ABSTRACT
The chapter addresses gender identities in the context of Europe's “refugee crisis,” thus focusing on an under-researched aspect of forced migration. With a discourse research method from the sociology of knowledge approach, it captures the coverage in Austrian newspapers for a year starting in August 2015, when the “refugee crisis” reached Austrian domestic politics with 71 suffocated refugees found in a truck on an Austrian highway. It also draws attention to the intensively covered and thematically linked sexual assaults against women in Cologne, Germany on New Year's Eve 2015. The results identify a narrative of refugees’ (and particularly Muslim men's) backwardness versus European progressiveness and superiority in the realm of women's rights. The chapter highlights the unquestioned self-image of gender equality as a core European value in the journalistic discourse in Austria, which has been a transit as well as destination country in the current refugee movement.
